The private collection of Ron Miller

The present lot—an archive comprised of draft scripts, concept artwork, continuity and reference photographs as well as film negatives—represents material from an early version of Total Recall set to be directed by the Canadian ‘𒁃king of bod🐠y horror,’ David Cronenberg, ca. 1984-5.

With a budget that ballooned to almost $90 million by the end of filming, Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) was one of the most expensive productions of its time and one of the last sci-fi blockbusters to rely primarily on the use of practical effects. Verhoeven’s monumental budget paid off—Total Recall was the fifth highest grossing film of the year and winner of the Special Achievement Award in Visual Effects at the 63^rd Academy Awards in 1991. While Verhoeven is the director that finally brought this adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” to the screen, Total Recall is the pro🐻duct of a film project that actually began over a decade earlier 🦂in 1974.

Cronenberg became attached to the project in 1984, ten years after producer Ronald Shusett first purchased the rights to Dick’s short story for screen adaptation and two years later, Shusett sold the project to Italian American mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis. From 1984 to 1985, Cronenberg created twelve drafts of a new script for Total Recall and began collaborating with technicians and artisans to start bringing his vision for the film’s Martian reality to life. Two of the artists on Cronenberg’s Total Recall team were the husband-and-wife duo—Judith and Ron Miller—who j𝔍oined the production as model maker and illustrator♕ respectively.

Working out of the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group’s studios outside of Rome, the Millers spent a year producing scores of drawings, paintings, set models, and prototypes for spacecrafts made from paper and balsa wood. Cronenberg’s Total Recall was a much more faithful adaptation of Dick’s short story, with little of Verhoeven’s campy irony that transformed the tale from a dark exploration of isolation and memory into something like an action adventure. Cronenberg’s vision, however, wasn’t all lost—Cronenberg is responsible for the addition of Martian mutants to the Total Recall universe, giving way to the creat💞ion of the pivotal Martian rebel char🙈acter, Kuato.

These archival materials represent an opportunity to explore a version of Total Recall that never was and discover a whole new side to the 🤡zeitgeist-channeling classic that kicked off a decade of cyberpunk 🍎filmmaking that came to define sci-fi in the nineties.